GI explained

Talking about the 79th anniversary of the trig pillar this month has sparked a flood of reactions. Lots of our lovely followers on social media sent us pictures of them (or their dogs) with our trig pillars around Britain. Others expressed delight that they now know what those odd concrete pillars were for. Some wanted to adopt a trig pillar if we no longer used them (sorry, not something we offer). Still more people were amazed that we no longer use the vast majority of trig pillars and asked us what we use instead. The answer to that is OS Net.

Today’s guest blogger is Jon Slade. Jon’s currently working on his PhD at Cardiff University, sponsored by Ordnance Survey.

After a fruitful year spent as a GIS Specialist at Arup I chose to change direction and return to the world of academia to study a PhD full-time at Cardiff University. Whilst I found the commercial world, in which I have worked for 15 years rewarding I missed really immersing myself deeply in a topic. My UCL MSc Summer research project ‘Google Maps Journey Immersion’ gave me a taster of this. And so, with experience of civil engineering from my time at Arup, a life-long love of maps and all things Ordnance Survey plus an unashamed fondness for reality architecture shows such as Channel 4′s Grand Designs, the opportunity to study a PhD on the Semantic and Geometric Enrichment of 3D Building Models at Cardiff, sponsored by Ordnance Survey felt ideal. This shall be my main area of work for the next 3-4 years.

Today’s guest blog is from Cristina Savian at Autodesk. If you were at last week’s GEO Business 2014 event, you may have seen our Acting Director General, Neil Ackroyd give his keynote and feature the image below, an infraworks model of Shrewsbury which was created using our new building height dataset. Cristina created the model and tells us how.

Customers using Ordnance Survey’s OS MasterMap Topography Layer can now access information on the heights of almost 20 million buildings across Great Britain with the alpha release of building height attributes. Released on 17 March, OS MasterMap Topography Layer – Building Height Attribute is a product enhancement to OS MasterMap Topography Layer, and available to licence holders at no additional cost. Read More

Ordnance Survey make 10,000 changes a day to the master map of Great Britain. This fact often astounds people and this behind the scenes story from one of our surveyors, Dom Turnor, helps explain just how many changes occur to our landscape every day.

I’m a forty-something field surveyor living and working in the rolling hills and hidden valleys of Worcestershire, where my primary job and purpose is to keep the large scale mapping up-to-date. I have been working as a field surveyor for nearly 13 years and have concentrated my efforts mainly around the golden villages of the Cotswolds, the post-industrial towns of the Forest of Dean and the wooded valleys of Stroud. It has only been in the last year that I have been transferred a little to the north; where I now find my area of responsibility to be the Malvern Hills.

If you’re a user of our maps, then you’ll be familiar with the small blue map symbols that give helpful tourist information when you’re out and about. If you’ve ever wondered how those symbols are checked and placed on our maps, today’s blog from Kim Hall, one of our team based in the East of England, will answer your questions.

I spend my working week interacting with Ordnance Survey mapping data, but it’s rare that I unfold a paper map and delve into the dark arts of map reading and navigation. I was offered the opportunity to reconnect with that part of our operations and to get in the mindset of paper-map user for the day… Read More

We have an excellent help and support section on our website to advise you on Ordnance Survey map products, map facts, maps and symbols for emergencies and getting the most from our online mapshop. A question we’re often asked is ‘what is GIS?’ and there’s a whole section dedicated to that too. Find out the basics here and visit the website to dig deeper into the subject.

Put simply, a GIS is a geographical information system, and to make that system work, you need maps and some software. We are one of many organisations producing map data for use in GIS. There are many more companies who then produce GIS software. Read More

We were delighted to have been invited along to participate in BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking Festival last weekend at Sage Gateshead.

Sage Gateshead is an iconic building, which opened in 2004, on the south bank of the River Tyne and hosts a range of musical education workshops, performances and conferences. It was a fitting venue to some of the country’s leading thinkers over a weekend which promised provocative debate, new ideas, music and performance.

Sage Gateshead Photo credit Mark Savag

Our Director General Vanessa Lawrence was invited to be on the panel for a session entitled ‘Why are maps still so powerful?’ along with author and academic Jerry Brotton – author of ‘A History of the World in 12 Maps’. Presented by BBC’s Rana Mitter, the radio interview was recorded in front of a live audience of around 200 map users.

Discussions are recorded for BBC Radio 3 and broadcast over the next three weeks or available to download.

We’re celebrating two years of our addressing product range AddressBase this month. Check out the facts and figures contained within our products in our infographic and find out more in our press release.

Yorkshire Wildlife Trust (YWT) is part of the influential UK-wide partnership of 47 Wildlife Trusts and has worked for more than 65 years to protect wildlife and wild places and educate, influence and empower people to conserve wildlife.

Responsible for 95 sites covering in excess of 6300 acres, YWT manages assets within different territories as well as mapping and tracking the ownership of site boundaries and collecting and storing extensive conservation data from surveys. They work with landowners on many conservation projects and mapping plays a key role in the large portion of their activity.

The Trust needed to be able to view and analyse the information they were gathering on a digital map – the data needed to be presented in a comprehensive, visual and geographic nature to fully understand the relationship between the data and the geography.This in turn would help with funding bids, as well as managing projects and memberships.

Case studies from the 2012 GeoPlace Exemplar Awards have now been published in book form.

The case studies celebrates the work of Award winning Custodians across the country and demonstrate how Authority Address Custodians and Authority Street Custodians are enabling local authorities to create efficiency savings and support service delivery.

The Custodians are the people responsible for creating and maintaining essential national resources in the form of the National Street Gazetteer and the National Address Gazetteer. The National Address Gazetteer is a critical part of the AddressBase® range of products which are now widely available, and being used by the public sector through the Public Sector Mapping Agreement (PSMA) as well as by the private sector.

The case studies featured in this book demonstrate the importance of address and street information to local government – with much of the best practice transferable to other organisations across the public sector.

About Us

OS is Britain's mapping agency. We make the most up-to-date and accurate maps of the country. But we're also a digital business, and we use our content to help governments, companies and individuals to be more effective both here and around the world.